Napoleon once said, ‘An army marches on its stomach. To be effective, an army relies on good and plentiful food.’ While that may have been all well and good for our camouflaged Action Man friends, the Royal Navy has a history of being a well-oiled war machine fuelled on liquor.
As far back as the 1700s the Navy began a rum ration to men serving in the West Indies, which consisted of a half-pint neat ration daily – sounds great. By the 1740s, however, the ration was being diluted with water and became known as ‘grog’, a term for rum and lime (or lemon juice), the latter added to help prevent scurvy. This daily ration lasted in one form or another until 1970, when it was finally phased out due to the complexity of modern equipment and heavy machinery, which wasn’t really tailored to being operated by sailors who’d stand no chance at a breathalyser test.
The culture of drinking drifted steadily away from the tot of rum and switched to beer. This occurred throughout all branches of the service, from ‘skimmers’ – surface ships – to the magnificent men, and now women, of the Submarine Service. You might think that being on a nuclear submarine, and in my case, on the nuclear deterrent, would warrant a ban on the hard stuff and an insistence on temperance for patrol cycles – but not one jot of it. Thank God! We were allowed to drink up to three cans of beer per day as junior rates, with senior rates and officers around the same, although they also had access to beer on draught. There was a bar in the senior rates’ mess where pints would be served and stewards would carry them down 2 Deck to the wardroom. So, given that a crew of 143 men could drink roughly the equivalent of three cans per day for an average patrol length of, say, 60 days, that was a lot of beer – both kegs and cans – to load up. There were roughly 75 junior rates on board, so that’s over 10,000 cans of booze right there. Of course, not everyone would imbibe their allocated lot – and that’s where the fun began. If I’d drunk my three cans and my ship mate didn’t want to drink that day, he’d sign them out under his name and give them to me, or vice versa.
This could lead to a situation where, of an evening, some of the crew and I could easily be drinking at least nine to twelve cans of beer each. On every third day the watch system rotated, so when I finished my watch at 8 p.m. and was not required until 8 the following morning, that was the time to indulge. We’d regularly work through crates of cans on those nights, and I suppose we saw it as a release from it all to enjoy the comforts of life at home for a few hours. I’ve been fortunate enough to have fairly good sea legs in terms of alcohol consumption; others, however, were not so blessed.
One night I’d just finished showing a film in the junior rates’ mess, I think it was The Untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery. Seated to my right was one of the chefs. For most of the evening he’d been enjoying plenty of canned lager, getting steadily more and more soused as each hour went by, and he continued to drink after the film, finally getting up shakily to leave. We all thought he’d gone to the toilets, and who knows, that might have been his original intention, but in fact he’d ended up somewhere else altogether. Suddenly, shouting and swearing erupted from the 3 Deck sleeping quarters. It sounded like there was a huge punch-up on its way. It turned out that instead of going to the toilets, he’d entered the chefs’ and stewards’ sleeping quarters, pulled back the curtain on his off-duty chef buddy and proceeded to piss all over him. Of course, I don’t need to say that we hushed up the whole incident to save him from some huge bollocking in front of the XO, or indeed face the captain’s table.
On another occasion, one of the stewards on board had drunk himself into oblivion in the torpedo compartment, which doubled up as the junior rates’ mess deck. He attempted to make his way to the toilets, and while traversing through a watertight bulkhead, slipped and fell through the fridge space hatch onto the floor below. It had been left open as one of the chefs was finding ingredients to prep breakfast the next morning. About wide enough to get a man through, it’s remarkable he didn’t kill himself by clipping his chin on the steel hatch and pushing his jawbone up into his brain as he fell through it. At the time, we thought we might be storing our first body in the refrigeration space. Remarkably, he climbed out of the deceptively cold compartment as if nothing had happened, then bounced off the walls as he quick-stepped his way to the toilet.
Looking back, I shudder at the thought of what might have happened if we’d had a sudden catastrophic emergency to deal with, with me, and indeed others, laid up in the torpedo compartment considerably the worse for wear. Not cool. For all the boozing though, I never once went on duty drunk, nor did any of my crew mates. Yes we played hard, but it was game face on come watch time. But social time on board Resolution centred upon alcohol consumption. It was good for the nerves, chilled out most people and led to an easier life; hardly ever was it a catalyst for violence or a row.
For me and many of the crew, alcohol was essential to break up the monotony of patrol life. I mean, what are you meant to do, cooped up deep in the ocean? There were no PlayStations in each mess, no internet access, no chance to send emails. We couldn’t be expected to live like monks; we needed a release, a sense of freedom, even for a few precious hours. And besides, it kept spirits up. Admittedly, some people, including myself, were fairly infantile in their approach to drinking at sea. Most sailors drink to get pissed, whether at sea or ashore, and we certainly drank ourselves to near oblivion shore-side. On many a morning I woke up in my shared dorm on shore, not knowing how I’d got back from wherever I’d been the previous night – a nightclub, restaurant or a girl’s flat.
It was the same at sea. I was young and impressionable, and there was considerable peer pressure to knock back a few ‘tinnies’. When you’re two to three hundred feet below the North Atlantic, you’ve only just passed Day 2 of 90 and have finished your watch in the control room, you kind of need the fix. If alcohol hadn’t been permitted, a lot of the crew would have gone stir crazy, as surviving on a social life of uckers and other board games was not going to cut the mustard. The great thing, though, was that if there was any trouble, such as the incidents I alluded to earlier, it was all kept in mess, for what happened in the junior rates’ mess very much stayed in the junior rates’ mess; no snitching to senior rates or officers, with the experienced leading hands keeping everything in line without going over the top. And it was good to be treated as an adult, which I was, just about …*
* Drinking has rightly been heavily curtailed since the tragic death of Lt Cdr Ian Molyneux in 2011, when he was murdered on board the nuclear submarine HMS Astute while heroically defending the rest of the crew by selflessly putting himself between crazed gunman Able Seaman Ryan Donovan and fellow shipmates. Donovan had been allowed to handle a weapon, even though he had drunk more than 20 pints of cider and lager, as well as vodka and cocktails in the 48 hours before his attack. The Navy now enforces similar levels to the UK drink-driving laws, and even lower for personnel handling weapons.